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Ola Krutrim, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) venture co-founded by Ola Electric CEO Bhavish Aggarwal, has reportedly laid off 100 employees, primarily from the linguistics division. It's the second round of layoff by the company after it axed a few other jobs in June 2025.
According to a report by The Economic Times,the layoffs are part of a Krutrim's team said that layoffs are part of "strategic realignment" to build a "leaner and agile team".
The downsizing has come weeks after Krutrim launched its flagship assistant, Kruti.
Storyboard18 could not independently verify the report.
The latest round of layoffs reportedly affected linguists hired across 10 Indian languages. Aggarwal has positioned Krutrim as India's answer to ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, rooted in multilingual capabilities with voice-first interactivity designed as per the India market. The compnay is also competing with Indian startups such as Sarvam AI and CoRover.ai.
The company has expanded Krutrim's team to 600, and several employees moved to Bengaluru just months ago.
The ET report said the layoffs have happened due to a delay in fundraising and a lack of product traction.
Krutrim became a unicorn, that is, the company's valuation surged to $1 billion in 2024 after it received $50 million in funding from Z47 Partners. This year, founder Aggarwal pledged to invest $230 million and said that the AI startups are seeking to attract an investment of $1.15 billion by next year.
Krutrim has developed its own evaluation framework, called BharatBench, to access the proficiency of AI models in order to address the gap in existing bechmarks that focus on English and Chinese.